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Napoleon once said, "History is a set of lies agreed upon." Tolstoy once said, "History would be a wonderful thing. If it were only true." Most often, what is history depends on the outcome of some conflict. As one truism says, "History is written by the victors." And when it comes to war, another truism says, "In war, truth is the first casualty." For the winning side, it remains a casualty. Also, no doubt, demonizing the enemy is a tactic as old as the hills. Another thing is that it is well known that one country's villain is another countries hero.

(November 14, 2019 at 9:22 pm)redpill Wrote: Napoleon once said, "History is a set of lies agreed upon." Tolstoy once said, "History would be a wonderful thing. If it were only true." Most often, what is history depends on the outcome of some conflict. As one truism says, "History is written by the victors." And when it comes to war, another truism says, "In war, truth is the first casualty." For the winning side, it remains a casualty. Also, no doubt, demonizing the enemy is a tactic as old as the hills. Another thing is that it is well known that one country's villain is another countries hero.

Since not knowing history dooms one to repeating it, I would say suckers are those who thinks history is for suckers.

(November 14, 2019 at 9:22 pm)redpill Wrote: Napoleon once said, "History is a set of lies agreed upon." Tolstoy once said, "History would be a wonderful thing. If it were only true." Most often, what is history depends on the outcome of some conflict. As one truism says, "History is written by the victors." And when it comes to war, another truism says, "In war, truth is the first casualty." For the winning side, it remains a casualty. Also, no doubt, demonizing the enemy is a tactic as old as the hills. Another thing is that it is well known that one country's villain is another countries hero.

We'll never get it quite right. Everyone who ever wrote a book has had a viewpoint, raised in a particular culture with a particular set of values.

Still, I think we have to do the best we can. Accept that perfect objectivity is impossible, but make that your aim. Then hope that the next guy who comes along can help you refine what you've said. It's a dialectic.

"Our attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately ... But the IAT [Implicit Association Test] measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level - the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think. We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And ... we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion." - Malcolm Gladwell